Reducing materials utilized during printing is not only economically beneficial, but can also benefit the environment. Current print control policies can enforce environmentally friendly, as well as cost saving, rules on end users when they print their documents by suggesting (or enforcing) printing on both sides of the paper when the document is larger than a specified number of pages. While reducing the use of paper can result in large cost savings, it is not the most expensive component involved in the printing process. Toner is far more expensive than paper and anything that effectively reduces the amount of toner used without affecting output quality can result in substantial savings. Traditional methods involve varying the density of the toner applied to the page (e.g. use of “draft” mode), but this often results in the document looking faded or washed out. One such software program is EcoPrint2™ by CoGen Media©.
Alternative approaches to saving toner, such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,791,714 B1, generally involve a post-processing step of analyzing each rendered/rasterized page using an algorithm for determining which pixels can be safely removed without affecting the formatting or layout of the original document. One of the drawbacks of this approach is that, while it does indeed save toner, it usually results in the document looking ‘washed out’ when color is used or ‘grayed out’ when black is used. Additionally, because these algorithms are applied to the entire rendered/rasterized page, any images contained within the page are affected as well. Print speeds may also be reduced in this type of post-processing step that is run against each rendered/rasterized page due to increased system resource usage.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for reducing toner usage while preserving the quality of the printout and without reducing print speed or affecting print layout.